No politics please...we're knitters
Please forgive the slight play on words here. I was rephrasing the title from the iconic 1970s film “No sex please, we’re British”.
There is an unspoken convention in knitting and craft groups that we don’t speak about politics. Like the old adage about never discussing religion or politics at dinner parties, it’s a topic that polite conversation usually steers away from.
And sometimes with good reason. I run an international Facebook group for knitters and I soon learned very early on that anything to do with ‘hot button’ topics would keep me glued to the moderators keyboard for hours at a time. Time I don’t have.
So, while we don’t have a no-politics rule per se we do have a strict ‘all about the knitting’ guide as to what posts are allowed. But often this leads to a real disconnect between our everyday lives and the reality of politics. And over the years under the culture of popularist politics that has worsened.
Even something as simple as a knitter posting about a finished sweater they have made for a non-binary relative or a same-sex partner can unleash a torrent of hateful comments without careful moderation and curation of the groups membership. I wish it wasn’t like that, but it is. People can feel emboldened to say the most horrible things, particularly online. And whilst strict moderation can help it doesn’t solve the root cause of the problem because it doesn’t allow for meaningful conversation.
On Friday, weak with relief that I had woken up to a Labour landslide victory I put a rare political post up on my Facebook group as I thought it was important to mark the event. Inevitably there were the immediate responses of ‘no politics please’ or even worse ‘I don’t do politics’
The latter comment came from a knitter who just the previous week was lamenting that her favourite indie dyer had gone out of business. The reason for this, as with so many small businesses in the UK, is that the economic reality of Brexit and losing 50% of their online sales has hit hard. Many small businesses are no longer economically viable. But that’s a very uncomfortable truth for an apolitical knitter to be faced with.
Politics affects us all, whether we acknowledge it or not and I genuinely think we need to start to find better ways of acknowledging that and having more grown-up conversations with people that don’t involve trading insults or snippets from Daily Mail headlines.
Chatting to a neighbour yesterday he joked that he hoped that, as a country we didn’t have any sudden crises because ‘that Keir Starmer doesn’t work after 6pm on a Friday’ - referring to a comment made in an interview about the importance of work life balance and that has been a right wing talking point for days. He said it jokingly and normally I would do the British thing of smiling politely and saying nothing. But this time I tried something different.
I didn’t smile. Instead I looked him in the eye and asked him in all seriousness “ Do you really believe that?”. He looked a bit shocked and blustered a little but I persisted, “Is that what you really think?” I pointed to the the cabinet meeting that had just been held, the press conference and the evidence of all the very real, very hard work that is clearly going on in No.10.
After a few nervous laughs he conceded that work has indeed been done and then, clearly uncomfortable he moved off.
But it got me thinking about how many small interactions like that I’ve heard over the years and just brushed off, not responded to. Every passive aggressive comment about the ‘loony left’ or immigrants that I’ve left unchallenged.
I’m not saying I’m going to be going round in future beating people with copies of White Papers but I am determined to talk about it more. To actually stop treating politics as though it is a dirty word and start to reclaim it as an integral, vital part of our working democracy. It’s only by discussing these issues that we bring them out into the open - and that means fewer shadows for ignorance and hostility to lurk in.
And yes, maybe that means that there is a little bit of space in knitting groups for politics.
This is Essay 4 in my 24 Essays Club series (hosted by
)Essay 3: Never knit with green yarn
Essay 2: Swedish Death Cleaning
Funnily enough, I was thinking about this very thing today. I wonder if the fact that we didn't speak up is what brought us to this point. I am no longer keeping my mouth shut for politeness sake.
Love your writing as always.
karen
So well said Louise. It’s important that we can have these discussions without all the backlash.